Truth be told, I’m not actually sure what this edition of the Exner Alert was originally going to be about! I’m sure I had a few ideas, but they all spilled right out of my head the moment I got word from my editor that I was allowed to announce not only the name of my project, but the publisher that greenlit it as well!
So without further delay, I’m absolutely thrilled to announce the Webtoon Original…
As previously mentioned, I’m not altogether certain when MoonRise is going to launch, as we haven’t received a definitive date yet. What I can say is that artist Cem Iroz and I are hard at work on it and that we’ve turned in 8 episodes thus far with a 9th just around the corner.
Gah! There’s just so much to say about MoonRise that I’m not entirely certain where to begin. I suppose the best thing to do would be to talk about a bunch of the aspects of the project in brief, and then save a deeper dive into those aspects for future Alerts.
What are those aspects, you ask? Well, for example we could talk about the idea itself and where it came from. We could talk about the pitch process. We could talk about my search to find an artistic partner. We could talk about how, once I found that partner, how we meshed with one another. We could talk about the series itself, the characters, the genre, the theme, and really just about everything or anything we can think of.
But, uh… right. In brief.
-The Idea. The idea is, I think, pretty out there, and may be why I initially got the greenlight. It’s about a werewolf, Kam, that’s forced to perform kill missions by a shadowy government agency, but when another of his kind frees him from captivity he learns he may be something much more than his captors led him to believe. At that point he has to choose between remaining the monster they made him, or pursuing a destiny much greater than he ever believed he was worth.
That’s the very non-spoilery version, at least. As the series progresses there’s a variety of twists and turns that reveal more about Kam, his past and what his role is set to be in the future, but obviously I don’t want to reveal too much here and now.
-Where’d It Come From? Believe it or not, Spider-Man. I’ve pretty much always wanted to write comic books, from the moment I first picked one up, and Spider-Man in particular. Spidey is my absolute favorite all-time comic book character, maybe even fictional character in general, and I’ve got dozens of ideas for what I’d do with the character were Marvel ever so kind as to hire me to write him. I used to keep those types of ideas locked away, to myself, on the off-chance Marvel came calling. However, not too terribly long ago a friend and fellow creator told me it was pointless to hold those ideas back, or in reserve. If you’re trying to write for a living, you’ve got to put your best foot forward each and every time. So I took my idea for a Spider-Man comic, I tweaked it (a lot) and turned it into its own thing. And thus, MoonRise was born.
-Pitch Process. Initially, one of the easier processes I’ve undergone. The reason being that I already had a relationship with the editor I approached to pitch my ideas since he’d been my editor on a previous work-for-hire project with Webtoon. Veterans of the Exner Alert will likely immediately know what I’m talking about, although I still can’t say what the work-for-hire project actually was because it’s yet to be announced. At any rate, in this case all the editor initially wanted from me was a 3-4 line description of the project, and he’d let me know if there was any interest at their end in seeing a pitch. If there was, it would be my job to put together a much more complex pitch package that’d convince them to greenlight the project itself, but, yo… 3-4 sentences describing the idea… that’s it? I’m not saying it’s easy to boil a project down to a few lines good enough to impress an editor, by any means, because it’s not. But in comparison with some publisher’s guidelines? It was a piece of a piece of cake, y’all.
Get to know your editors!
-Artist Search. Another of the easier processes I’ve ever had. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve actually had a fair deal of success wrangling talented artists to work with me in the past, but in most of those cases it’s boiled down to the fact that I have a certain budget to work with, can usually only pay for the pitch, if that, and then if the project is greenlit we arrange to work with one another with (hopefully) profits on the back-end. Either that, or I pay out of pocket almost entirely to get a story or an issue or two done, self-publish them, and then when I’ve saved up enough to work with them again we’ll give it another try if their schedule allows.
Fun, right?
But in this case I was provided with a budget in advance by the publisher, and so this time around I was able to approach artists with all my cards laid on the table from the get-go. This is how much we’d be earning an episode, I’d pay this much of those earnings to the artist, an episode would average around this many panels, and so the artist would be paid this much per panel. It really made not only approaching artists easier, but also sifting through any nonsense since there was a no-nonsense budget attached to the project from the word go. If they liked the price (and the project) we’d talk more. If not, it was an easy “Maybe next time” and then I could continue the search.
The Collaboration. So far so good! I genuinely feel fortunate to have found Cem. He’s monumentally talented, but also just a good guy in general. And let me tell you, the man is also prolific! Allow me to cite an example. Cem and I “met” (through Twitter direct messaging) in early August of last year (so we’re actually coming up on our one-year anniversary). I pitched MoonRise to him at that time, basically a quick synopsis - similar to the elevator pitch I’d initially sent to my editorial contact at Webtoon. Cem liked it, emailed me to say so and asked to hear more about the project. I sent an email back that same day with some preliminary thoughts about how the series would progress start to finish, some basic thoughts about the how the main and supporting characters might look, etc. At this point none of the characters, beyond Kam, even had names. But Cem took my email and replied within 24 hours with not only a variety of character designs that blew my mind, but a title logo as well! More on that in a future alert, but suffice to say that’s about how the relationship has been going ever since.
I think that’s probably enough for now. I don’t want to talk too much about the series, characters, theme, etc. straight away because I don’t want to give away too much, but I really do have a ton more to talk about and a lot of really amazing art from Cem to show off leading up to whenever our launch date will be.
Much much much more to come.
Quickies
-A whole bunch of trailers dropped at SDCC (San Diego Comic Con) of movies or TV series that I’m quite interested in viewing. The trailers for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Shazam: Fury of the Gods were terrific, each in their own way. Now, I didn’t cry during the Wakanda Forever trailer, but for anybody that did… I understand. Really well done, and sparked genuine feels related to the untimely and unfortunate (and those are understatements) passing of Chadwick Boseman. The Shazam trailer, in contrast, just seems like good fun that continues with the underlying theme of family, which I’m also all for. And while those trailers interested me the most, one thing I really like about SDCC is that they’ll drop things for just about everybody. I mean, seriously, the range in those links is pretty insane if you think about it.
-Speaking of movies, I watched The Sea Beast on Netflix with the family this past weekend. Enjoyed it quite a bit. Definite Moby Dick and How to Train Your Dragon vibes throughout, so if you enjoyed either of those pieces of fiction then I think The Sea Beast will be right up your alley. I also greatly enjoyed the complexity of the protagonists. They each had flaws to overcome throughout the course of the film and did so in significantly different ways.
-Did end up finishing the 3rd season of Atlanta this past week like I said I would. I don’t know what else to say that hasn’t been said by critics and audiences alike. It’s genuinely one of those things I’d recommend everybody, especially in the United States, should watch, and then probably re-watch and/or read analysis of because there’s subtle things in the episodes you miss the first time around that tend to stick with you far afterwards once you realize they’re there. As I’ve said before, the sort of writing I aspire to, without a doubt.
-Weighed 292.4 on Monday, down from 295 even the Monday before. That’s without much effort on my part other than trying to avoid fast food and be slightly more active. Once I begin watching what I eat (and how much of it) and start actually exercising on a semi-regular basis those numbers should improve. Now… when am I actually going to do that? That’s the question.
No, I’m not going to answer it right now. Maybe next Alert. Talk to you then, o’ alert ones.